Tesla's (TSLA 3.55%) demand is red-hot, with some vehicles even requiring a one-year wait, and many projects are still in the works for the future. In this clip from "3 Minute Stocks Updates" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on May 11, Motley Fool contributor Brian Feroldi discusses Tesla's impressive performance and its production goals going forward.
Brian Feroldi: Moving on to Tesla. Always fun to give a Tesla update in three minutes or less. But here we go. Let's try. The headline numbers. Amazing. Were just fantastic. Revenue up 81%, $900 million ahead of Wall Street's estimates. Earnings per share were $3.22, up a measly 246%, blowing past Wall Street's estimate. Headline numbers for Tesla were absolutely fantastic. Check out these numbers. Gross margin approaching 30%, operating margin of 19%, and net margin of 17.7%. Their net margin is just below Ford (F 0.60%) and GM's (GM 1.32%) gross margin if that gives you any sense of this company's profitability. Free cash flow for the quarter, huge, $2.2 billion net income was even higher than that. The balance sheet is in amazing shape: $17 billion in cash, $3 billion in debt, and a whole bunch of that debt is basically leases and things like that. If you strip that out, this company is essentially debt-free. Amazing financial performance. If you look at production, production was up 69% during the year. Storage revenue was up 90%, still supply chain constraints on the storage side. Solar week quarter down 48%. It's basically a rounding error when compared to the rest of the business. The big news, more recently, that Giga Texas and Giga Berlin are now in the production stage. They are ramping. Full self-driving is now available in Canada, or at least the Beta version of it. The Roadster, the Semi, the Cybertruck, all delayed until next year. Why? Management said we would make less cars this year if we launched them. This year is all about scaling up. Model 3 and Model Y, those things were delayed for those reasons. The management said on the call that some of their vehicles, if you order them today, currently have a one-year wait. How's that for demand? It's robust. Now, next quarter is going to be more challenging. There's a one month shutdown in China due to Covid, its Gigafactory there is a major part of the company's growth. But they are still calling for 50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries this year. They also teased on the call that the robo-taxi production is going to be in volume by 2024. They plan on rolling out insurance to 80% of U.S. Tesla customers by the end of this year. Their long-term plan is to produce 20 million cars per year. By the way, there's this thing called Optimus, the Tesla humanoid bot which Elon thinks is going to blow away the TAM of the car business and the battery business combined.
